If you’re blessed with fortitude and don’t mind learning something displeasing about yourself, look at the app on your phone that monitors how long you spend each day hunched over the small screen. If you’re like most people, you divide that amazing number of hours between checking email, killing time with dopey videos, engaging in pointless arguments on social media, and perhaps half a dozen other footling activities. Hours on your phone don’t include time on a tablet, or doing serious and productive work on your office computer. The point is that if you are like most people, your screen is hogging your time.
About six or seven years ago, I started an unscientific survey as I commuted to and from work in my car. I’d simply count people I saw through the windshield and noted the number who were using their phones. If I remember rightly, only about 1 in 5 people were on their phones when I started doing this, but within a short space of time, the number rose. Now at least half the people I see on Washington’s sidewalks, waiting at bus stops, pacing back and forth on a call, or, like me, driving their cars, are glued to their phones.
Now, accepting that we’re on the darned machines far too much, imagine a back door on all your gadgets allowing the malignant actor who made them to get in and note your every use of your machines, your every person you contact, all your passwords, and the social security number you’ve foolishly stored there.
It is no stretch to imagine it, as Zack Cooper and Eric Lorber make plain in our cover story, “Red Flags.” There is serious concern, that Washington is only now starting to address, that national security could be jeopardized by the fact that so much technology in the hands of the public is made by our strategic rival and likely future enemy, China. The biggest country in the world, with the second-biggest economy, run by a dictatorship, is relentless in its economic espionage and backdoor surveillance, and it is ushering in a new epoch of turbulent great-power relations.
Elsewhere this week, Daniel Allott explains how Republicans lost what was recently the deep-red bastion of Orange County, Calif., and draws conclusions about what the party must learn if it is to contain the damage and flourish in future elections.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry laments the sad demise of an oak tree. It’s not just any oak tree, but the one planted on the South Lawn of the White House in April 2018 by President Trump and President Emmanuel Macron of France. It was supposed to be a robust symbol of Franco-American amity, so one must hope both countries are doing spadework to preserve their fraternity and not letting it wilt with the desiccated plant.
Peter Tonguette sings the praises of his fellow nerds; Fred Barnes celebrates the triumph of Arthur Laffer; and Philip Klein skewers the dumbest conspiracy theory of them all: that Trump will refuse to leave the Oval Office if he is defeated in the presidential election next year.
